By Graham Smith

The man with political responsibility for growing Cornwall’s economy can expect plenty of questions tomorrow (Tuesday) about the £22 million of public funds invested in a Newquay shed.

Louis Gardner was not even a local town councillor when in 2017 Sandra Rothwell, then the chief executive of the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership, hatched plans to strike a Newquay spaceport deal with Richard Branson.

Now the Cornwall Council cabinet portfolio holder responsible for the spaceport, councillor Gardner could be forgiven for reflecting how quickly things can change.   Seven days ago he was enjoying the limelight of national media attention.  But now he has a high-tech, fabulously expensive shed – “a satellite integration facility” – and no satellites.  The spaceport has become a national joke, even though blame for the multi-million pound disaster rests squarely with Mr Branson.

Barely a week after astonishing social media viewers with claims that the spaceport had already created 150 jobs and injected £200 million into Cornwall’s economy, councillor Gardner must now face questions at a full council meeting about whether he has the political courage to make some spectacularly difficult decisions.

The most obvious question is how much taxpayers’ money councillor Gardner plans to spend on the spaceport in the coming financial year.  Indeed, why spend anything at all?  If it were a community hospital, Cornwall’s Conservatives would not hesitate to mothball the facility.

Fortunately for the handful of spaceport staff, none is a rocket scientist.  Instead they have a broad range of marketing, public relations and admin skills which might be redeployed back at County Hall.  The social care sector has plenty of vacancies.

The council’s budget is only weeks away.  Having declared that “statutory responsibilities” should have priority in the face of huge and damaging cuts, it would be perverse for the Tories to give special treatment to the lamest of non-statutory lame ducks.

Once County Hall has stemmed the haemorrhage of cash, officials might usefully open a dialogue with the Ministry of Defence about whether its “Space Command” might be interested in councillor Gardner’s shed.  Most of the satellites destroyed last week had military and intelligence agency applications.

In the months ahead, there will be more questions – not least driven by the historic, first-ever Space Accident Investigation Bureau investigation into what went wrong.  All the signs are that Mr Branson’s low-cost liquid-fuel Newton rocket engines are simply not robust enough to be reliable.  Their failure rate, to date, is 30%.

There is only one other company, in the world, which puts satellites into orbit from a horizontal launch – but Northrup Grumman is already providing its solid fuel rocket motors to a company based at Prestwick, near Glasgow.

There are also questions to the Civil Aviation Authority, over safety, which have the potential to put County Hall on the back foot.  The council has relied on the claims of Mr Branson and might now need to exercise more independent judgements.

One councillor who has long taken an interest in the spaceport told Cornwall Reports:  “What we need now is more science and less spin.